Decided to catch up with some old friends in a new city, and what better place is there than a bar? The three of us left the bar at around one in the night and came home talking about things that led to talking about other things. Then, we walked around the neighbourhood in our drunken haze, and we talked with the pints of stout still fresh on our breaths. It was precisely the buzz I wanted to walk off, frankly, and the weather was not particularly the walking kind, not that it was any bad.
It was alright, as was the stout, and as was the conversation, but then, it is not clear who said it, but we went from talking about nothing to a conversation that turned into an argument, and it was not until the morning at around five when I realised there had been a window. Not that the argument remained. All my friendships are contentious ones, and most, if not all, conversations end somewhere near the middle ground. But all I had to do was keep my mouth shut for a few minutes; that is all it would have taken for things to take a different direction. But then, confrontational as I am, I said something before it passed.
Regardless, it was alright, and then, I went to sleep and woke up with the glaring sun and a throbbing head. There is rarely any feeling more debilitating than a hangover, after all, and so I spent the day only lazing around this new flat, without curtains, without cushions on the couch, without any detail that makes it a home, makes it lived in. And so, without much to do except watch some TV and drink coffee, I kept looking out the window, thinking about how I tend to miss it in all things.
I thought of all the women who had told me I had been utterly clueless, that there was a time when all I had to do was say the word, and I thought of how it did not occur to me until years later when I heard them say it. With nothing to do and a mild headache, I thought of all the conversations in this short life, of arguments big and small.
I did this until the sun went down. Like some accountant who only points the errors out, I kept thinking about this and this only: of how aloof I have been, of how there is always a window with things—for love, for opportunity, for quiet—and how I have missed it over and over, always waiting too little, and mostly, too much.
This piece is a part of the The Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium on Windows, written a few hours before the deadline ended, finished haphazardly, and perhaps, poorly, in fear of missing yet another window in life.